After Donald Stephenson had pulled himself out of the pile of rubble that was all that remained of his primary control station, a quick glance around the chamber had brought home the extent of the destruction inflicted by the McFarland girl. In addition to destroying the primary control station, she’d used the secondary stasis field to sever the main lines that supplied power to the gateway and to the stasis field generators.
But she’d overlooked one thing. The stasis field generators had a bank of emergency capacitors modeled on the advanced Rho Ship capacitor design. They couldn’t store enough power to activate the gateway, but they had plenty of capacity to provide twenty minutes of secondary stasis field operation. And twenty minutes was all he needed.
Dr. Stephenson moved across the cavern floor, passing directly in front of the gateway device, its interior dimly lit by the red glow of emergency lighting and the reflected glitter of electrical lines arcing within the damaged power cage, where severed cables hissed and spat like angry cobras. Mounting the three tiers of steps that led to the secondary stasis field control station, he glanced at the blood pooled in and around the chair bolted to the steel grating. He dipped his fingers into it, raising them to his nose. Dr. Stephenson wasn’t sure that it was enough to prove fatal to the McFarland girl, but it brightened his day.
Ignoring the blood, Dr. Stephenson seated himself in front of the terminal. The workstation was still powered on, drawing on its uninterruptable power supply’s fifteen-minute backup battery. The battery indicator showed just over half of that charge remaining. Pulling up the emergency override panel, he switched power sources from primary to the emergency capacitor backup. As he tapped this new source, the battery warning indicator disappeared.
Dr. Stephenson’s fingers danced across the keyboard, entering the commands that would bring the secondary stasis field generator back online. While he wasn’t as quick as Raul’s neural net, he was far from slow. An invisible bubble expanded across the cavern until it encompassed the area around his workstation, the stasis field generators, the gateway device, and, finally, the damaged portion of the power cage.
With that protective barrier in place there would be no further outside interference. Manipulating individual stasis field tendrils, he began repairing damaged power cables, making use of the network of cameras and instrumentation available to him. And without his having to worry about killing the power in the hot lines, his repairs proceeded far faster than any team of electrical engineers could have made them.
His first priority was to restore power from the matter ingester. That would allow him to dump a full charge back into the backup capacitors, as well as providing the power he needed to reopen the Kasari gateway.
Suddenly the outside of the stasis bubble went white. Despite the nearly perfect shielding, Dr. Stephenson felt his retinas burn out, momentarily blinding him before the nanites in his bloodstream could repair the damage. Only one thing could account for that flash, a nuclear detonation. And while the stasis field had protected him from the initial radiation and blast effects, all hope of restoring power had just evaporated, along with the unprotected parts of the ATLAS cavern and all the surrounding facilities.
Without being able to see it, Dr. Stephenson knew that only the stasis field kept him safe from the intense radiation and the super-hurricane force shock wave that hurled debris outward from the blast. In a few minutes those same winds would rush back to fill the void they had left behind. And although the emergency capacitor power would probably last long enough to protect him from that, no amount of nanites could save him from the hell that awaited when the stasis field began to die.
As his vision slowly returned, Dr. Stephenson rose to his feet to stare at the surreal scene. Like a child’s snow globe, a dome of protection surrounded the undamaged section of the cavern while a roiling inferno altered the surrounding landscape. The ATLAS cavern was gone, the walls vaporized for hundreds of meters in all directions, the rock beyond that reshaped into a bowl of glowing molten glass.
With the scope of his failure burning his brain like a hot tong shoved up his nose, Dr. Stephenson turned in a full circle. In a handful of minutes, the secondary stasis field would slowly begin to fail, bathing him in a radioactive dose equivalent to that of a bad sunburn, painful but nothing his nanites couldn’t repair. Then, in a decaying exponential, the radiation would keep rising, and, as when an egg was boiled in a microwave, there would come a point when fluids burst through the skin as his juices boiled away.
How long would it take him to die?
Not liking the result of his mental calculations, Dr. Donald Stephenson turned back to the secondary stasis field control station. For two and a half seconds, his finger hovered over the KILL POWER button. Then, as his finger descended, the protective stasis field winked out.
President Jackson and his national security staff stared at the televisions, all tuned to CNN. At first the reporter had seemed to experience a kind of meltdown, but had regained her calm.
“For those of you who may have just joined us, we continue to follow our top story, the international effort to prevent the November Anomaly from becoming a black hole that threatens to destroy our planet. As we have been reporting, within the last few minutes we’ve received reports of a nuclear detonation centered at the ATLAS cavern. We go now to our White House correspondent Rolf Larson.
“Rolf. This has been just another in a sequence of what can only be described as disastrous events. Has there been any official White House response?”
“Karen, we’ve been awaiting an official statement on what has transpired within the ATLAS facility, beginning with what appeared to be an attempted alien invasion through the Rho Gateway, followed by a series of explosions and the loss of all broadcast feeds from within the cavern itself, culminating in a nuclear explosion at the site.”
“Rolf, excuse me for interrupting, but we’ve just received confirmation that there has been a nuclear explosion at the ATLAS cavern. We are just getting the first video of the mushroom cloud as seen from Geneva. Oh my God. This is something we hoped never to see in our lifetimes.”
“Karen, we’re seeing it here on our monitors. This has to be heartbreaking for anyone with family members working at the site, for the military units that were positioned around the ATLAS site, and for the Swiss and French people. We here at CNN have also suffered the loss of Ted Cantrell and our entire crew reporting from the scene...”
From his position at the head of the table, the president muted the broadcast and turned toward Cory Mayfield, his director of national intelligence.
“Cory?”
“We’ve got General Smith holding on the line from Ramstein.”
President Jackson pushed a button on his control console.
“General Smith. This is President Jackson here in the Situation Room with my entire national security staff. Give me a rundown of what you know.”
“Mr. President, as you are aware, our attempts to remotely detonate the nuclear devices failed despite several attempts to correct the problem. Army Captain William Everett, our on-site nuclear weapons specialist, volunteered to manually detonate the nuclear warheads. From the fact that we’re all still alive, it is clear that, despite the naysayers in the scientific community, the nuclear option destroyed the November Anomaly and the gateway.”
“Casualties?”
“Only estimates so far, Mr. President. Each warhead had a twenty-kiloton yield. The blast occurred a hundred meters below ground. That’s both good and bad. The ground helped limit the range of the immediate blast effects as well as the initial gamma pulse, but we’ll see a lot of alpha and beta fallout due to the amount of dirt and debris sucked up into the mushroom cloud. Prevailing winds are westerly at ten knots. That’s bad for Switzerland, Austria, and parts of Bavaria and Italy, but good news for most of the major European population centers.
“Our worst case estimate shows up to ten thousand killed in the initial blast, maybe ten times that over the coming weeks and months. I’ll need data from our nuclear survey teams before I can be definitive.”
“Thank you, General. That’s all for now.”
President Jackson disconnected the call as the door opened to admit Carol Owens, his chief of staff. Seeing the look on her face, President Jackson almost dreaded to ask.
“OK, Carol. What’s happened now?”
“Mr. President, I just took a call from Dr. David Kronen at Los Alamos. The Rho Ship is gone.”
The information failed to register. “Gone?”
“Yes, sir. Dr. Kronen says that one moment it was there and the next it disappeared and took half the building with it. Fifteen people are missing and presumed dead. If it had occurred during the day, we would have lost hundreds.”
“What time did this happen?”
Carol swallowed. “Shortly after we lost the television feed from the ATLAS cavern.”
The president lowered his head, massaging his temples with his hands. When he raised his face again, he looked directly into Carol’s eyes.
“I want to keep this away from the public for three days. Tell Dr. Kronen he has that long to get me some answers. For now, we have to stay focused on the events in Switzerland.”
Turning his gaze to the others at the table, he continued.
“Well, folks, we’ve got a bunch of frightened and angry people out there, all of them wanting to know what the hell just happened and what comes next. We can’t deny being behind the nuclear detonation, nor do I intend to. So an hour from now I’m going to walk out into the White House Briefing Room and lay it all on the line. You’ve got until then to come up with the best way to spin it.”
A sudden, unseemly surge of joy spread through the president. Yes, he’d been responsible for the killing of tens of thousands of innocent people, but he’d saved the planet. All things considered, not a bad day’s work.
Freddy Hagerman eased up the steps, trying to avoid busting his ass on the ice. Eight days after the almost-end of the earth, his fake leg wasn’t doing him any favors. At the front door he paused, his finger hovering an inch from the doorbell. His timing was unusual, to say the least. Six thirty on a Monday morning wasn’t the time he usually called on people. It wasn’t a time people expected strangers to come calling. Or friends either, for that matter. But at this hour he knew the McFarlands would be home and so would their next-door neighbors, and he didn’t want to have to do this more than once.
He pressed the button, hearing the chime echo through the house. Thirty seconds later a tall, slender man opened the door, a questioning look in his brown eyes.
“May I help you?”
“Mr. McFarland, my name is Freddy Hagerman.”
The kindly look departed as if Freddy had slapped him. As the door began to close, Freddy stopped it with his left hand. “I’m sorry, but I really have to speak with you.”
“I don’t talk to reporters. Can’t you people leave us alone?”
“This concerns your daughter and her friends.”
If anything, McFarland’s face grew colder. “It always does. Now get out of my doorway and off my steps before I call the police.”
As the man reached out to shove him out of the way, Freddy held out a DVD case. “They sent you a video message.”
Mr. McFarland froze, confusion clouding his features.
“If you’ll let me in, I’ll explain everything.”
For several seconds nothing happened. Then McFarland blinked twice and stepped back to allow Freddy entrance. Stepping inside before he could reconsider, Freddy pulled off his brown leather driving gloves and stuffed them into his coat pocket.
“Who is it, Gil?”
Freddy turned to see a comely woman step into the living room, her right hand pushing a strand of gray-streaked brown hair behind her right ear.
“OK, you’re in,” Mr. McFarland said, his voice suddenly husky. “Say what you came to say.”
Glancing back and forth between the two McFarlands, Freddy unbuttoned his coat.
“I’m here because last night I met with the president of the United States and agreed to hold off on publication of my story for one more day. For his part, he agreed to allow me to meet with you and the Smythes before he takes action based upon my story.”
Holding up the DVD case, Freddy focused on Mrs. McFarland. “Heather and Mark recorded this video message and had it delivered to me two days ago, along with instructions that I first watch it with you and the Smythes. So here I am.”
As his wife’s knees buckled, Mr. McFarland grabbed her, supporting her to a seat on the couch.
“I’m OK, Gil. I’m not a child.” As she turned to look at Freddy, Mrs. McFarland’s damp eyes held his, her face regaining its composure. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“Freddy. Freddy Hagerman.”
“Mr. Hagerman, please take off your coat. I’ll get some coffee started while Gil goes over to get Fred and Linda.”
“Anna...”
“Gil, I told you, I’m fine. Now hurry over and get our friends. As for the coffee, I think we’re going to need it.”
By the time they’d watched Mark and Heather’s video and Freddy had finished his story, Freddy felt as if every emotion had been physically wrung from his body, leaving behind an empty husk.
Gil and Fred had both called in sick, and Freddy knew that wasn’t far from the truth. Despite the happiness that came from discovering that Mark and Heather were alive and well, the shock of Jennifer’s heroic sacrifice had clearly left both families feeling as if they’d lost her a second time.
Against that backdrop, Freddy told his tale of government deceit, beginning with the murder of Jonathan Riles, the betrayal of Jack’s team, and the sequence of murders and criminal actions that had eventually led to Mark, Heather, and Jennifer’s flight to Bolivia, and their subsequent capture, torture, and escape.
The lead story in tomorrow’s New York Post would carry Freddy’s byline. But tonight the president would hold a nationally televised, prime-time press conference, informing the nation of the actions he would be taking to ensure the abuses detailed in Freddy’s investigative report were properly dealt with and appropriate measures put in place to ensure that they could never happen again.
Now, as Freddy slid into his coat, said his good-byes, and trudged through the cold wind toward the rental car that would take him back to Albuquerque, he realized just how hungry he was. That was OK. He’d wait until he got to the airport to down a burger and a beer while he watched the president cover his ass.
In the meantime he’d savor the knowledge that the McFarlands and Smythes knew far more of the story than the president or public ever would. As far as the US government knew, Heather McFarland and the Smythe twins had perished in the nuclear explosion that killed so many at the ATLAS site. And Freddy intended to leave it that way.
It had been almost a month since that fateful day in the ATLAS cavern. Seven kilometers southeast of Mes?o Frio, Portugal, a cold breeze swept the vineyards that fell away toward the River Douro. Beautiful in spring, summer, and fall, the harsh specter of winter held the wine region in its deathly grasp, stripping the vines, leaving them as barren as this winter night. Though she felt the ghosts of all the innocents she’d killed reach out through those twisted vines, it was another ghost that brought Heather to her knees.
Aided by her augmented neural system’s control over her human growth hormone production, her physical injuries had healed. The same couldn’t be said of her mental wounds. Heather knelt beside Mark, tears leaking from her eyes to drip from nose and chin into the rich soil. And as Mark wept unashamedly beside her, Jack and Janet stood watch a short distance up the hill.
It was an odd place for a memorial service, no pastor or priest, only Mark and Heather kneeling together in the barren vineyard, crying and laughing, as a lifetime of Jennifer memories played through their shared minds. And though they had nothing of Jennifer left to hold in their hands, she would live forever inside them.
Their last sight of her standing beside Raul in the Rho Ship was almost too painful to bear, but they replayed it, sending out the good-byes they’d never had a chance to voice. Jennifer had launched the Rho Ship into its own wormhole, leaving nothing of herself for them to bury. Heather raised her face to the heavens. Somewhere in that vast emptiness between the stars, Jennifer’s body floated, entombed with Raul inside the Rho Ship. The loneliness of the vision loosed a new round of sobs that left Heather shaking so hard that, had not Mark swept her into his powerful arms, she would have sunk to the ground.
When the sobs died away, she leaned back, wiped the tears from her face and then from Mark’s, kissed him full upon the lips, and rose to her feet. Holding tight to his hand, she led him back through the vines to where Jack and Janet waited. Then, without a word being spoken, they began the half-kilometer walk back to their rented farmhouse.